THE Global Justice Movement Website

This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.

Friday, January 11, 2019

News from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 02

As politics, economics, and
religion continue to mix (being the same thing to an increasing number of
people), the world picture becomes increasingly confused and confusing . . .
unless you come over and take a walk on the side of common sense.Analyzed from a Just Third Way perspective,
it’s astonishing just how much of what is going on starts to make sense . . .
and the right thing to do becomes more obvious:

Yes (surprise, surprise) socialism has always been "democratic."

• Democratic Socialism.A
blog posting this week on “democratic socialism” seems to have a number of
adherents of democratic socialism baffled.They know that it must be
wrong because they disagree with it, but . . . damme, sir, they can’t dispute
the facts (all of which are cited as to source), and they can’t refute the
argument, which is logical . . . but . . . but . . . but . . . it must be wrong!! They just can’t figure out why!As a result, a number of them have “shared”
the posting on FaceBook, begging and pleading with their fellow democratic
socialists please, please, please to
find something wrong with it!If they do
manage to find something wrong with it, we sincerely hope they tell us what it
is . . . so we can fix the flaw(s) in our argument.Simply telling us it’s wrong without
specifying the problem is less than helpful.As a side note, it was particularly interesting that twice as many
democratic capitalists complained about the post, although one or two might
actually have attempted to give a reason for their disagreement.They were not able to, but at least they
tried.

• Media Outreach. Work has been advancing on CESJ’s prototype
instructional video as well as a number of publications, including compendia of
the writings of CESJ co-founder Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. and Judge
Peter S. Grosscup.We are also looking
at reformatting the CESJ podcast and restarting the CESJ newsletter.We have also been experimenting with
producing video “book trailers” to spread the word about CESJ’s publications,
both the free e-books and the more traditional bound books.

Jean-Baptiste Say ("Say's Law")

• Amazon, Whole Foods, Sears, K-Mart, and Say’s Law.According to the “Buzz on the Street,” Whole
Foods, a subsidiary of Amazon, is looking to take over the vacant buildings
left by the Sears-K-Mart meltdown.While
the disappearance of what people used to call “affordable” food, clothing, and
shelter naturally has us concerned, and although we’re not really averse to “big”
business per se, what we do find troubling is the concentration of ownership of
the means by which most people are supplied with the necessities of life.After all, it doesn’t really matter if a
cartel controls diamonds (unless you’re talking industrial diamonds) but it
matters a great deal if a small number of owners or the State (capitalism and
socialism, respectively) control that which people need to live on.Of the two, State ownership or control is
worse, because annoying some bureaucrat means you are cut off, possibly even
imprisoned or killed, while a capitalist might be persuaded to lower prices or
give charity.This is where the wisdom
of Say’s Law and Kelso’s addition come in useful.In order to ensure that supply generates its
own demand and demand its own supply, the means of production should be as broadly
owned as the needs of consumption are felt.That is, every consumer should be a producer, and vice versa, either
through labor or capital.

Pius XI: the State should not be overburdened.

• Government Shutdown.The
government shutdown raises some interesting questions about just how big
government has gotten and how far it has strayed from the original concept of
the tool of the State.The State is an
essential social tool, but like all tools should be used only when it is
needed, and for the purposes for which it was designed.After all, you wouldn’t use a sledgehammer to
open a can of beans, especially when it isn’t even lunchtime, and you’re having
a bologna sandwich in any event, would you?The idea that the government is shut down except for “essential services”
is a concept that should alarm us far more than it does: why should a government be providing non-essential services?We start to get into the situation against
which, e.g., Pope Pius XI warned in § 78 of his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno,

When we
speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly to mind, not as if
universal well-being were to be expected from its activity, but because things
have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism”
that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life
which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there
remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of
the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the
taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the
State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.

Irving Fisher (Quantity Theory of Money)

• Bad Assumptions = Baffled Analysts.In today’s Wall Street Journal James Mackintosh opines that “Investors Can’t Figure
Out Fed” (01/11/19, B-1, B-10).The
problem, of course, is that both the Federal Reserve and the investors are
using an erroneous assumption, one that has increasingly taken over both
private and public understanding of money and governed monetary and fiscal
policy of the world since the early 1930s.And that is?That the amount of
money in the economy determines the “velocity” of money (the average number of
times each unit of currency is spent in a year), the price level (how much
things cost), and the number of transactions.This is stated mathematically as the Quantity Theory of Money equation:
M x V = P x Q.Anyone who has taken high
school algebra, however, will instantly see the problem: you can’t have three “dependent
variables” and only one equation!In
other words, you can’t fiddle with M (the quantity of money) and expect V, P, or
Q to mean anything.Of course investors
can’t figure out what’s going on, because the Federal Reserve doesn’t know what’s
going on.They haven’t caught on to the
fact that V, P, and Q should determine M (that is, M should be the dependent
variable), not the other way around, or all you will have is chaos.

Is it twilight or dawn for energy stocks?

• Violating the First Principle of Reason Department. Also in today’s Wall Street Journal, in the Finance section, there are two
headlines on the first page, B-12.One
is, “Energy Stocks Go From Drag to Leader.”The other one reads, “Don’t Bet On Oil’s Bounce To Continue.”The problem here is that people think that
the prices on the stock market actually mean something other than reflecting
the emotional state of gambling addicts.The editors of the Journal might be excused for trying to have their
cake and eat it, too, by predicting both a continued boom and a downturn on the
same page, but readers should be a little more savvy and possibly start to use
their own brains for something.

"Aha! Another one who didn't sign up!"

• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/.Next, sign in to your Amazon account.(If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.)Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.”If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through.Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.

Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.”If you have a short
(250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the
blog — do not send them to us to post for you.All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.